Doblin: Fred Phelps will find out whom God hates

In this March 19, 2006, file photo, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. preaches at his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Phelps, the controversial anti-gay preacher who picketed funerals, died on March 20, at 84.

Alfred P. Doblin is the editorial page editor of The Record. Contact him at doblin@northjersey.com. Follow AlfredPDoblin on Twitter.

GOD hates Fred Phelps. I so want to hold up a placard emblazoned with that message and stand yards away from members of Phelps’ family as they grieve the death of their hate-mongering patriarch. But I cannot.

Phelps founded the Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas–based church that spewed homophobic vitriol for decades. While Phelps also hated Jews and an assortment of other minorities, it was his vile diatribes against gays that reached epic proportions.

He discovered that by protesting funerals – particularly military funerals – he could get national attention. And he did. He also inflicted pain on the families of dead U.S. troops as his minions waved signs that said, among other things, that “God hates gay people” in not-so-polite terms.

The demise of the 84-year-old preacher was not unexpected. There were websites devoted to his death watch and his death will be a test of whether those of us who have witnessed firsthand what discrimination feels like can rise above the pain and find some higher moral ground. I can’t say I am standing on that mountaintop.

What made Phelps such a maggot of a man was that he literally fed off the bodies of the dead. He used funerals as a way of selling evil and he packaged it all under the brand of God. You would have to search far and wide to find a large enough rock that could have given shelter to such a slug.

My heart went out to the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder who sued the Westboro Baptists for invasion of privacy when the church staged a protest at the dead Marine’s funeral. The Snyder family was awarded more than $10 million in a jury trial but eventually lost on appeal. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the Westboro Baptist funeral protests were protected speech.

They are. No way around that. The Constitution that guarantees the rights of citizens to live in a free, democratic society is mainly silent on how its citizens use that freedom of speech. It is not a totally unrestricted right, but there is a large grey area where speaking hate is not the same as hate speech.

There would be something theatrical about a massive protest of thousands of people at Phelps’ funeral – assuming there is a funeral and I have read that is unlikely. But the Westboro Baptists feed on publicity, so a large-scale protest is a gift to old Fred. It makes him important even in death.

The placards if printed with messages of hate would do nothing but verify that Phelps had indeed found an effective way of spreading a message. The challenge for those of us who have at one time in our lives feared for our personal safety because of the likes of Phelps is both to repudiate everything he stood for and not give in to the momentary satisfaction of exacting revenge on his family and followers.

These people will not feel shame or hurt. There has been no shortage of public denunciations of the Westboro Baptists. The evil that men do lives on past their deaths. The same is true of the good.

Matthew Shepard died at age 21 in 1998. The young man was beaten, tied to a road post and left to die because he was gay. Phelps and the Westboro Baptists protested at Shepard’s funeral.

No one knows what Shepard would have done with his life had he not been killed at such a young age, but his brutal death woke up many complacent Americans and made them aware of the dangers of unchecked homophobia. All the still-untapped good locked inside that 21-year-old man was released and it has helped transform attitudes about homosexuality.

Phelps could not stop such a force. Almost 16 years later, gays and lesbians have more protected rights in America and more Americans are seeing that sexual orientation does not define who someone is – the soul is neither straight nor gay.

Still Phelps’ evil will not be buried with him. The Westboro Baptists are part of the national conversation until no one listens, no one notices, no one pays them any attention. And I am not alone standing here well below the mountain top. I want them to feel pain, to feel my pain. But for that to happen they would have to care about me and they do not.

There are reports Phelps was excommunicated by his church. There have been no reports that the reason was his church changed its views on selling hatred. Phelps is responsible for inflicting pain on families at their most vulnerable moments. He was a two-bit preacher who found a megaphone and never let go of it.

I don’t know whether God hates Fred Phelps or whether there is some final spiritual accountability for what we do on Earth. But there is no way at getting back at Phelps now. He’s dead. Maybe that’s all the justice we can get.